Daily Archives: May 29, 2014

“Don’t plug this in” mystery untangled

Posted on May 29, 2014 by | 5 comments
Seems to me that's asking for it. I did manage to resist the temptation, but it was difficult.

Seems to me that’s asking for it. I did manage to resist the temptation, but it was difficult.

Do not plug in this USB connector

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

I had an appointment with the cardiologists over at the KC VA yesterday and they clarified that USB plugged device I got in the mail.  Future shock is what it is.  They’re sending me a thing to sleep in the vicinity of that will communicate each night with my nocturnal electrical emissions device [defibrillator].

They’re sending  it to me and all I have to do is plug this into it and around 2:00 am the shocker will download my days affairs of the heart to it.  And it will quickly upload it all to someplace in San Francisco where another machine will look it over, twiddle its thumbs, and decide whether there’s anything illegal my heart muscle’s been up to.

In the unlikely event my heart’s been sneaking around getting cheap thrills and got busted by the defibrillator whispering gossip about it to the Coleman Camp Stove piece, and it reporting it to the San Francisco Heart Police, they’ll send it to the KCVA cardiologist right after breakfast, next day.

Then, if he thinks it’s worth it, the cardiologist will contact me and explain what’s going on, or went on, while I slept.

So KC VA cardiologists don’t want to see me until something interesting happens and they find out about it from the heartthrob gossip columnists.  And the previous day the private cardiologist who put it there in my shoulder examined it and said essentially the same thing,

How about that?  Barring any new drama I don’t have to see anyone about my broken heart for a year.  And other than the physical therapy that will go on for another month-or-so, I’m draft-exempt insofar as medicos.  Sure, I’ll have to fill various prescriptions and be financially crippled for the remainder of my life because of this series of events beginning November 9, 2013.  But I’ll just be writing $10 checks to each of them every month unless they turn me over to their collection agencies.

If they send out their constables with summonses or their leg breakers trying to squeeze blood out of a broken heart shaped more like a turnip, power to them.  Get in line.  I’ve got no more sympathy for them than a multinational bank has for someone loses his job and gets behind on house payments.

Except the VA.  If you can’t pay whatever’s due them for co-pay they go directly to Social Security and get it deducted from your pension.  I’ve naturally got more than my fair share of sympathy for folks who can do that.

Old Jules

 

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Kansas City Star

Posted on May 29, 2014 by | 4 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

The KS Star gave Boy Scout merit badge hunters a gold star on Sunday.  Jeanne and I figured to visit the Union Cemetery, oldest one in KC, on Memorial Day just for the hell of it.  Then I saw the KC Star front page had Boy Scouts out decorating graves of veterans there.  And everyone using the words ‘Veteran’ and ‘Warrior’ interchangeably.

This isn't Union Cemetery, but you get the idea anyway.

This isn’t Union Cemetery, but you get the idea anyway.

As it happens a lot of  one-time Confederates are buried at the Union Cemetery.  Once a person gets into the spirit of putting flags on graves, might as well send the troop out with Confederate battle flags, too.  Most were one-time Confederates who died decades after the Great War of Secession, but there’s a monument over the mass grave of Confederate POWs who died in a prison camp near here.  That one got a forest of Confederate battle flags.

I say this with some authority, though we took a pass on the Memorial Day visit.  Went out there Sunday, Memorial Day Eve, instead.  Though most of the burying that’s ever going to be done there has already happened, 55,000 funerals seems plenty for most normal purposes.  And a surprising lot had flags sticking up from them courtesy of Boy Scouts.  Back in the heyday of Union Cemetery veterans had a lot bigger wars to get drafted into.

Likely as not somewhere out there the Boy Scouts put German flags on WWI Germans who fought in the Big one on the wrong side before migrating to the US.  Maybe even a few from WWII.

Because the only way past the post-WWII series of incomprehensible US military adventures in foreign lands with any hope of inspiring those Boy Scouts to enlist to buy a piece of one is to ignore the Wars and glorify the warriors.  Dead or alive.  Company clerks, regimental band trumpet players, helicopter mechanics.  All heroes, all warriors, all guilty of conspicuous courage without having to do a damned thing to demonstrate it to anyone.

If you’ve never done anything worth mentioning in your entire life and never will, visit your Army recruiter.  Gets you a flag on your grave after everyone’s forgotten everything else about you.

A lot of old US Veterans have to be getting a lot of secret laughs about this in the privacy of their home bathrooms before they hoist their trousers, pluck their galluses over their shoulders, and carefully place their cammy ball caps with VETERAN over the visor onto their gray pompadours.

Old Jules

 

 

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